Many International Schools around the world offer an IB Programme, and we recently had an increase in Brazilian schools incorporating it as well. Still, many parents don’t know which are the differences between the IB and the regular curriculum, and why doing an IB course can benefit students in the long run, especially if they aim to pursue Higher Education abroad.
In this article, you will understand the basics of the IB and its Diploma Programme, which we currently offer at EARJ. All in under 5 minutes!
What does “IB” mean?
IB is short for International Baccalaureate®. The IB offers an education that empowers young people with the values, knowledge and skills to create a better and peaceful world. Its programs enable students to make sense of the complexities of the world around them, shaping them into global citizens.
At EARJ, we have offered the Diploma Programme for High School students since 1982. We are one of the pioneering schools in Brazil on IB education.
Diploma Programme
The Diploma Programme (DP) aims to develop students from 16 to 19 years old to have excellent breadth and depth of knowledge – students who flourish physically, intellectually, emotionally and ethically. It also better prepares them for the next steps of their academic and professional careers, compared to the regular curriculum.
There are three parts to the core of the IB DP, all of which are required for the diploma.
- Theory of Knowledge (ToK): Subject which leads students to think critically about knowledge and their own learning process.
- Extended Essay (EE): An independent piece of research about a topic of interest of the student, culminating with a 4000-word paper.
- Creativity, Activity, Service (CAS): A student-led project completed over an 18-month period. It can be related to the Arts, physical activities, voluntary service, and more.
There are also six subject groups in the curriculum, with different courses in each group which will be chosen by the student:
- Studies in language and literature
- Language acquisition
- Individuals and societies
- Sciences
- Mathematics
- The arts
What’s next?
EARJ is currently a candidate school for the Primary Years Programme (PYP), which covers education for children aged 3 to 12. For the next school year, we will become a candidate school for the Middle Years Programme (MYP), for students from 11 to 16 years old.
Follow us on our road to become a full IB World School!
Click here to learn more about the IB at EARJ.
You can read everything about the programs in ibo.org.
In April 23rd, we celebrate the World Book Day, a global event created by UNESCO in 1995 to encourage the reading, publishing and copyright of books everywhere. This year the slogan for the date is “Ok. So your next book is…?”.
To help our community pick their next story, we asked our Senior Leadership Team which are their favorite books and why would they recommend it. We have titles for every age, fiction and non-fiction. Let’s keep our reading habits fresh!
Nigel Winnard – Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
A tale of monsters, wild-eyed scientists, thrilling adventures, breathless chase scenes, love and tragedy. Hollywood has visited its pages many times, both seriously (watch Kenneth Branagh’s excellent movie version) and not quite so seriously (Herman Munster!). But no film version has ever managed to capture the power of reading this novel alone on a dark, stormy night…
It’s a novel that I’ve gone back to many, many times and it has taught me a great many things. One of those lessons is that ugliness lies in what people feel, say and do, not in what they look like or how they might appear. And to think that Mary Shelley wrote this incredible novel when she was just 19 years old…
Cody Alton – The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
At the heart, this story is about a person searching for their path in life, or their destiny. In it, a boy named Santiago sets out to find his treasure. This book resonated with me when I first read it as I, like the main character, had left my home and my possessions behind as I set out on my path within international education.
Each person he meets, as well as each triumph and struggle he endures along his path, helps him further understand more about life and his own personal journey. Without giving away too much, your treasure is not always what you think it is at first, and not always where you think you will find it.
Claudia Araya – The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
This book is one of the most beautiful love stories I have ever read. I know that there is a movie and it’s a great one too, but it’s nothing like the book. It is full of beautiful emotion and it’s based on a real-life love story! I remember reading one page at a time when I realized that I was finishing it. I didn’t want it to end!
Cristina Conforto – The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition (Caroline Alexander)
The Endurance is a book that I have read twice, within a 10 year difference, and from time to time I go back to some of the highlights I did while I was reading it.
It recounts one of the last great adventures in the heroic age of exploration. In August 1914, before the outbreak of the First World War, the explorer Ernest Shackelton and a crew of twenty-seven crossed the Atlantic coming from the UK to be the first ones to cross on foot the Antarctic continent. Within 85 miles of their destination, their ship, Endurance, was trapped in the ice pack. It took twenty months until they were rescued.
Apart from the thrilling story and the amazing pictures taken by the photographer on board, it is a book mostly about courage, leadership, and teamwork in an extremely adverse situation.
Howard De Leeuw – Ego is the Enemy and The Obstacle is the Way (Ryan Holiday)
Two of the most profound books I have read in the past five years are from Ryan Holiday, entitled Ego is the Enemy and The Obstacle is the Way. Holiday relies heavily on stoic philosophy to give the reader a practical and helpful approach to the realities of life and the human condition.
I found myself going back and re-reading sections as well as each entire book several times, and the ideas truly fed me in ways that few other books have. These are also some of the few books that I have actually purchased recently in hardcover, after having read them first on my mobile device, thanks to a Seattle Public Library app, which allows me to check books out online and read them for free first.
These hard copy versions did not make it with me to Brazil, and I am looking forward to digging them out of my shipment in Seattle this summer and bringing them back with me, as it is time for me to read them both again. I highly recommend both books to anyone willing to challenge their self-perception and to view the world in a different way!
Emilia Ferreira – The Essentialism (Greg McKeown)
I read The Essentialism two years ago and again in 2020. It was the perfect time to do it again because the book speaks to some of the lessons that I learned with the pandemic and that I will remember for the rest of my life. It talks about “the pursuit of less” and about “distinguishing the vital few from the trivial many”. Choosing to do what really matters is not an easy task, but it is critical that we keep reminding ourselves to focus our time and energy on what is really important in our lives.
Doreen Garrigan – Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh (Robert C. O’Brien)
One of my favorite memories from Elementary School is when I read this book. I was fixated on the characters and the way in which the author wove together a storyline with lots of adventure and compassion.
The story is about a group of rats with abnormally high intelligence who live together underground. They are unique rats and prefer to keep it a secret. Mrs. Frisby, a widow mouse, reaches out to them for help when her son becomes extremely ill and consequently discovers their secret. There are heroes and villains in this story and my love for this book has not changed since the year I read it in class. Enjoy!
Scott Little – Into Thin Air (Jon Krakauer)
Krakauer’s personal account of the failed 1996 Mount Everest disaster in which 8 climbers were killed was a book that I simply couldn’t put down. The book chronicles the failed mission to reach the summit of the world’s tallest peak and examines what happens when safety methods are compromised in a race to the top between competing guiding teams. If you’re looking for an adventure book, I can’t recommend Into Thin Air “highly” enough.
Carlos Pinho – War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
At its core War and Peace is a book about people trying to find their footing in a world being turned upside down by war, social and political change, and spiritual confusion. The existential angst of Tolstoy and his characters is entirely familiar to those of us living at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and his novel has important things to say to us in this moment.
Over and over again the book shows how moments of crisis can either shut us down or open us up, helping us to tap into our deepest reservoirs of strength and creativity.
Ana Paula Stadelmann – The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World (Melinda Gates)
“When you lift up women, you lift up humanity.”
I was intrigued to know more about Melinda’s philanthropic pursuits after watching her interview with David Letterman, on Netflix. In this book, she shares not only her own stories and beliefs but the stories of people around the globe who have dared to take steps to change the world.
This is an easy read book with valuable lessons, including how empowering women makes a positive impact in society as a whole. Not surprisingly, inspirational examples of schools, the notion of equal education, and teachers are amongst her stories.
Kirstin White – Maybe the Moon (Frances Ives)
Maybe the Moon by Frances Ives is a book I love sharing with Lower School students! This book has beautiful illustrations and a lovely text. It tells the story of Eric, a little boy who lives in an amazing l forest home, surrounded by animals and natural beauty. Eric loves his home and spends every night gazing up at the sky and thinking about how the moon shines down on him and the forest friends he loves.
One day, Eric’s mother tells him that they are going on an adventure to a new place – the city. Eric feels anxious and needs to find new ways to adapt and find happiness in a strange new environment. He learns many lessons, including how to love the differences between people and places, and most importantly the lesson that no one is never alone when we share the same moon.
I love reading this book with children and classes that are new to EARJ; it helps everyone connect to the idea of adapting to and finding joy in meeting new people and visiting new places.
My grandad, born in 1903 and raised in the interior of the State of Rio, was a self-taught man. Being a farmer, a businessman, and a politician in the region, he was not only amazing with relationships and numbers, but also an avid reader. He loved all kinds of books: poems, crimes, novels. As he got older and started to face health struggles, he would ask other people to read for him.
So one given day when I was 11, he intentionally handed me a book to read him a poem, a poem that he loved. It was a portuguese translation of the poem “If”, by Rudyard Kipling. I did not understand much while I was reading it; so after I finished, he patiently guided me through it. I liked it so much that I wrote the poem in a piece of paper and took it home with me.
As my life went by, I would eventually read it again. No matter how many times I read it, I would always relate to or learn something new from it. I don´t think my grandad could have ever left me a greater heritage, as it has empowered me and supported me through so many times in my life.
He never spoke English or visited a different country other than Brazil. But he had books to transport him to the whole world, through his own eyes. As there is no such thing as one story, one character, one poem. Two people will never have the same vision, like movies for instance, where you see and hear everything, and just have to process it. The perspective of a story, the challenges set by a poem, the way a character looks in a book read by a farmer in a tropical country may be completely different from someone living on the other side of the globe with different social, geographical, and cultural realities. Books read by the same person in different times of their lives may differ. A lot. And that is the magic of books.
On April 23rd we celebrate “World Book Day”. How about reading a simple story to your child without pictures or drawings, asking him/her to keep their eyes closed and describe the scenario, the character, the light, the smells… you can do the same, and then you will have fun comparing the two outcomes!
PS: I learned in the EARJ International week that “If” has consistently been voted as Britain’s favourite poem… so here’s the poem, with the translation in Portuguese that my grandfather presented me “a few” years ago. A big thank you to Rudyard Kipling and all the writers of this planet.
IF – By Rudyard Kipling
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
SE… – Rudyard Kipling
Se puderes guardar o sangue frio diante de quem fora de si te acusar;
e, no instante em que duvidem de teu ânimo e firmeza,
tu puderes ter fé na própria fortaleza,
sem desprezar contudo a desconfiança alheia…
Se tu puderes não odiar a quem te odeia,
nem pagar com a calúnia a quem te calunia,
sem que tires daí motivos de ufania,
sonhar, sem permitir que o sonho te domine;
pensar, sem que em pensar tua ambição se confine,
e esperar sempre e sempre, infatigavelmente…
Se com o mesmo sereno olhar indiferente
puderes encarar a derrota e a vitória,
como embuste que são da fortuna ilusória,
e estóico suportar que intrigas e mentiras
deturpem a palavra honesta que profiras…
Se puderes, ao ver em pedaços destruída
pela sorte maldosa, a obra de tua vida,
tomar de novo, a ferramenta desgastada
e sem queixumes vãos, recomeçar do nada…
Se, tendo loucamente arriscado e perdido
tudo quanto era teu, num só lance atrevido,
tu puderes voltar à faina ingrata e dura,
sem aludir jamais à sinistra aventura…
Se tu puderes coração, músculos, nervos
reduzir da vontade à condição de servos,
que, embora exausto, lhe obedeçam ao comando…
Se, andando a par dos reis e com os grandes lidando,
puderes conservar a naturalidade,
e no meio da turba a personalidade;
impávido afrontar adulações, engodos,
opressões, merecer a confiança de todos,
sem que possa contar, todavia, contigo
incondicionalmente o teu melhor amigo…
Se de cada minuto os sessenta segundos
tu puderes tornar com o teu suor fecundos…
A Terra será tua, e os bens que se não somem,
e, o que é melhor, meu filho, então serás um Homem!
Cristina Conforto
Director of Advancement
